RiseUp Summit

15,000 Attendees, Three Days, One System.

RiseUp Summit has spent more than a decade shaping the Middle East’s startup ecosystem, and its 2026 edition was its largest to date. Held over three days at the Grand Egyptian Museum, it brought together founders, investors, thought leaders, students and ecosystem builders from around the world, with more than 15,000 attendees, over 400 speakers and 300 startups across multiple stages.

The programme spanned keynotes, panels, workshops, startup exhibitions and investment matchmaking, run in parallel across the venue over the three days. A summit built for that many different audiences, founders, investors, professionals and students among them, needs ticketing that can tell those audiences apart, not just sell a single type of pass to everyone through the door.

The KNOT Technologies Impact

For RiseUp, KNOT built ticketing around how people actually attend a multi-day summit. Single-day and multi-day passes ran side by side, so a visitor dropping in for one keynote and a founder attending all three days could each buy the pass that matched their plans, with every pass tracked and scanned consistently across the event and reflected in real time on analytics dashboards the RiseUp team used to monitor sales and attendance throughout.

A meaningful share of the audience, students, investors and other ecosystem figures, was eligible for complimentary tickets rather than a paid pass. KNOT built an automated accreditation system to manage that: applicants submitted their details and requested category, the system checked each request against eligibility criteria automatically, and a free pass was issued the moment an applicant was approved, with no manual review needed to process each request. That kept the free-ticket allocation controlled and auditable at a scale no manual process could match.

Once approved, distributing passes to thousands of accredited attendees, alongside every paying ticket holder, ran through the same platform, so the summit issued and tracked every pass, free or paid, from a single system rather than managing accreditation and ticketing separately.